By Jenny Shepherd, Aug 30 2019 11:11PM

999 Call for the NHS supports the campaign with WeOwnIt & Keep Our NHS Public to really get our NHS ‘off the table’ in any trade talks with Trump.

A trade deal with Donald Trump is a danger to our NHS.

The only way to get the NHS off the table is for Parliament to urgently create legislation - along the lines of the NHS Reinstatement Bill - that entirely removes privatisation and competition, closes the door on US healthcare giants and protects our regulatory standards.

What YOU can do

- make sure Johnson feels the big oomph! to legislate NOW to take the NHS off the table in Trump trade talks.

Visit the WeOwnIt site ( address at the end of this blog below) where they've made it easy to make your voice heard. Start by inserting your postcode and the rest is simple.

Successive governments have starved the NHS of funding

all the better to create pressure to sell off 70 years worth of unique patient data to global companies.

A recent EY (Ernst & Young) consultancy paper trumpets the NHS’s “significant data assets” that cover the entire UK population from birth to death. Current data held by the NHS today amounts to 55 million GP patient records and an estimated 23 million patient-episodic care records that are held by hospital trusts and include details on admissions and medical interventions in accident and emergency departments.

The EY money grabbers, anxious to feed their corporate clients, reckon that the value to a commercial organisation of the curated NHS dataset could be as much as £5bn per annum.

They attempt to sweeten the nasty taste of stealing patients’ confidential medical data to sell to profiteering companies with the suggestion that, sold off to commercial organisations, this could:

“deliver around £4.6bn of benefit to patients per annum, in potential operational savings for the NHS, enhanced patient outcomes and generation of wider economic benefits to the UK.”

This is cobblers. The NHS is capable of delivering benefit to patients on the basis of data in our patient records. There’s NO NEED to sell it off to commercial companies. And it’s probably not even lawful to do so.

EY’s recent paper confirms what we've known about the consultancy company’s intentions for some time. For at least the last 7 years EY's been advising its corporate clients about ‘capturing value from the human body as data platform’.

to prevent the hijack of the NHS by life sciences, big pharma and digital technology companies. We are calling for an update to the NHS Reinstatement Bill.

We think it's common sense. The landscape of the NHS has been altered so radically and

in the face of NHS England's proposed legislative changes for Accountable Care Organisations (now rebranded as Integrated Care Providers), we are loudly advocating for an updated NHS Reinstatement Bill that puts medical innovation including DIGITAL & AI into public hands – in order to protect the NHS from the real agenda of Accountable Care: what Ernst and Young calls "capturing value from the human body as data platform.

You could call this the "Facebook model" of healthcare where an apparently free service is monetised by capturing users’ data. In pursuit of this goal, the NHS is being broken up and massively redisorganised into a testbed for life sciences and digital technology corporations’ “disruptive innovations” (their positive spin).

Post-Brexit, the government’s aim is to export these disruptive innovations to China, India, Saudi Arabia, Africa, leaving NHS patients stranded high and dry with a rump service, while the huge wealth of 70 years of millions of patients’ confidential medical data is mined for the profit of life sciences and digitech companies.

His job will be to strengthen DeepMind’s partnerships in the NHS and overseas with the aim of applying AI to clinical practice.

Accountable/Integrated Care business and clinical models – whatever rebranded names they may go by – serve the interests of life sciences and digital technology companies, not of NHS frontline staff, patients and public.

And so does May’s speech about the promised £20bn extra NHS funding by 2023.

To prevent the hijack of the NHS by life sciences, big pharma and digital technology companies, we suggest that an updated NHS Reinstatement Bill must bring the development of drugs and life science/medical technologies into public ownership through the establishment of a National Health Innovation Authority, and at a regional level, should replace Academic Health Science Networks with regional Health Innovation Boards.

This would restore evidence-based, clinically effective practices and cut costs by ending profiteering. It would redesign medical innovation as “Health Innovation as a public good”, driven by public health needs and social justice. This must be transparent and accountable to the public; deliver products and interventions that improve health outcomes, and that are accessible and affordable to all; and it must contribute to the progressive realization of the right to health.

There should be clear guarantees about data protection for patients’ confidential medical data and a refusal to put this on the market for purchase by private companies. This huge unparalleled source of health data must remain in public ownership for the public benefit.

"The future of the NHS is more uncertain than ever as we face the threat of a No Deal Brexit and rushed through trade deals with the US. In [this] context, the risk that the commercial exploitation of NHS data is 'on the table' for negotiation, is chilling.”

We know it's going to take political legislation to bring back the NHS into public hands but we remain independent of all the parties in order to lobby and pressure all the parties. We are about people and the NHS they should be able to keep.